2 posts from June 2018

Members of the Digital Scholarship team, Alex, Rossitza and Stella, attended The Carpentries community inaugural conference held on the relaxing campus of University College Dublin 29 May-1 June. The atmosphere at the event was energising thanks to the enthusiasm of the community members who volunteer to teach computational, coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.

The theme of the event â€śBuilding Locally, Connecting Globallyâ€ť permeated the rich programme of talks and interactive sessions that focused on sharing knowledge, networking and developing new content and strategies for strengthening and growing The Carpentries. A report on the conference has been published by Belinda Weaver and this blog post by Raniere Silva summarises well some of the key messages.

Thus, particularly relevant for us were the sessions led by Belinda Weaver and Chris Erdmann about growing the software and data skills training provision for library professionals. We engaged in a conversation with members of The Library Carpentry community about how best to review and create new curricula and resources, as well as how the needs of the broader culture heritage professionals may vary. There are opportunities to work with university departments, professional bodies and regional consortia to get library and other GLAM professionals involved with The Library Carpentry. Watch this space for our team's involvement with The Carpentries and for further updates follow The Library Carpentry blog and Twitter feed, and The Carpentry Clippingsnewsletter.

Below are just few highlights from the sessions we took part in:

@frameshiftlic : Diversity and inclusion go hand in hand. Much more needs to be done to increase diversity and inclusivity in the technology sector.

The Carpentries community uses GitHub to maintain training materials and good guidance was provided on how to clone and fork repositories and submit pull requests. A great teaching resource Happy Git and GitHub for the useR is being developed for Software Carpentry by Jennifer Bryan

Tracy Teal talked about the funding model, operations and infrastructure of The Carpentries who have updated their website, logo, handbook and a Code of Conduct. Curriculum development, equality and inclusion, and building local capacity for training remain high priorities for the community.

Most engaging was the interactive breakout session on developing a new software carpentry lesson on High Performance Computing (HPC). The session leader Alan Oâ€™Cais used the classroom engagement platform Socrative to gather attendeesâ€™ feedback on existing lessons, appropriate content and the learner profile.

Other great sessions covered best approaches to teaching live coding at university, post workshop community development strategies, and how organisations, such as The Software Sustainability Institute and ELIXIR, have been supporting The Carpentries community initiatives.

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As a PhD student, Iâ€™m privileged to spend three years of my life investigating a subject I find fascinating, but one of the absolute highlights of the first year of my study was the week I spent attending the Interactive Fiction Summer School at the British Library last July. My research explores how mobile phones are changing storytelling, so interactive fiction was a subject I was keen to find out more about â€“ and how better to do so than by learning from the experts how to write my own?

It was an excellent course, as we learned not only about the mechanics of writing stories where the reader plays a part in deciding what happens â€“ how to make your readerâ€™s choices both engaging and manageable, for instance â€“ but also about storytelling more generally: how to generate momentum and make your ending both surprising and inevitable. Over the course of the week, we each wrote our own interactive stories, drawing on what we learned from our tutors and getting to grips with the mechanics of the form: my own story ended up unexpectedly drawing upon my experiences teaching in Japan.

One of the weekâ€™s many highpoints was a session on the use of conflict in interactive fiction, run by Rob Sherman, who shared a thought-provoking work heâ€™d created for the housing and homelessness charity Shelter, about a woman struggling to keep her family safe and happy in a world of rising costs, lowering wages, and disappearing support. This year, Rob is leading the British Library's summer school, curating sessions from a range of experts including the poet and interactive writer Abigail Parry (last yearâ€™s excellent course leader), Gavin Inglis, and Hannah Powell-Smith.

The summer school had other benefits too: including spending time with fascinating and creative people interested in the storytelling possibilities of interactive fiction, sharing ideas, and collaborating: I remember one particularly memorable session working with two of my fellow students on a story about a performance artist who decides to enact that old myth about frogs in boiling water herself, and ends up in boiled to death in an underground swimming pool as part of an installation about the damage weâ€™re doing to the environment.

The summer school attracted a wide range of people, from young would-be writers, to academics and storytelling professionals. One of my fellow students was Sita Brand, director of Settle Stories, whose annual festival of storytelling takes place in the picturesque Yorkshire market town of Settle. Sita invited me to speak at this yearâ€™s Festival, and so I found myself this April talking to an audience about my research into how mobile phones are influencing storytelling and being interviewed by Dave Driver for Dry Stone Radio. (You can hear the interview here â€“ from 1:34 on.)

Telephone box at Settle Stories, where attendees pick up the phone handset and dial for a story

If I've whetted your appetite and you are interested in attending this summer's Interactive Fiction Summer School at the British Library, which is on the theme of Infinite Journeys, booking details are here. It runs for five days, beginning Monday 23 July and ending on Friday 27 July. Also, if you are interested in my research on fiction being written for smartphones, then I'm giving a Feed the Mind talk on Mobile Stories: New Kinds of Fiction? on Monday 11 June, 12:30-13:30, booking details here.